Self organizing network (SON) based technologies, including automatic neighbor relation (ANR) functions, are designed to improve management and optimization of mobile wireless networks. Such functions include automatically adding/removing entries to/from neighbor relation tables (NRTs) that specify neighbor cell relationships for handovers. However, identification, analysis, and interpretation of handover failures has been challenging due to: changing network conditions with respect to the addition of new cell sites; seasonality effects with respect to time of day and/or day of week in long term evolution (LTE) wireless communications; and difficulty in identifying root cause(s) of excessive handover failures with respect to radio frequency (RF) environment conditions, lack of resources within source and/or target LTE evolved node Bs (eNodeBs). Consequently, identification of root cause(s) of handover failures has had some drawbacks with respect to optimizing neighbor cell relationships for improving handover performance.